Your customers have different communication styles and different intelligences. When you understand their different styles and intelligences, it becomes easier to create effective social media marketing strategies. If you have yet to prioritize social media marketing, you may want to reconsider your current content marketing plans.
Nearly 70 percent of American adults use Facebook and about three-quarters of them access the platform on a daily basis. The benefits of social media for business are numerous, and that’s why you should prioritize it for marketing purposes. If you’re not, you’re falling far behind the 93% of marketers that are tapping into the benefits for business benefits.
How Many Social Media Platforms Are There?
There are literally thousands of social media platforms, maybe even millions. The main ones that you need to focus on for social media marketing purposes are:
Here’s a list of more social media platforms that you may want to consider for marketing purposes.
Benefits of Social Media for Business
When it’s leveraged correctly, you can use social media marketing to boost brand loyalty, increase customer engagement, and optimize your conversion rates. In fact, just about any type of online marketing can help you achieve those benefits. Keep reading to explore the benefits of social media for business and how you can use it to transform your brand and achieve higher levels of success. As you’re reading, keep in mind that there are various forms of visual assets. You’ll want to use different types to enhance your social media marketing efforts. These different types include infographics, whiteboard animations, explainer videos, and more.
Strengthen Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty is an intangible asset that, although it cannot be seen, has a significant impact on the success of your brand. Along with increased brand loyalty comes a boost in brand advocacy. As you build brand advocates, your brand awareness expands, and this results in greater traffic to your site and a potential increase in sales. Brand loyalty also sways customers from price sensitivity, meaning even if your price increases, your customers will still purchase from you.
One of the easiest ways to increase brand loyalty is with social media marketing. When your followers and fans view you as an industry expert, they not only share your posts, but they advocate for others to purchase from you. Brand advocacy like this comes free of charge and will increase your social media marketing ROI.
To increase brand loyalty with social media marketing:
- Create a social strategy: Focus not only on publishing new content, including infographics and videos on a regular basis, but also engaging with fans and followers.
- Find your voice: Assess your brand’s personality and find a complementary voice. Make sure that all the content you publish across social media matches this voice.
- Maintain your visual identity: Any visuals that you publish should complement your visual identity. This is pertinent to brand recognition and brand recall.
- Reward your followers: Social media gets its name from the fact that you’re supposed to use the platforms for social purposes. Rewarding followers and fans with discounts and special offers encourages engagement.
- Create a community: Study your buyer persona, reach out to those who match your persona, listen to their concerns, and answer their questions.
- Provide superior customer service: Don’t ignore negative responses and posts about your brand. Leverage them as an opportunity to showcase your first-class customer service.
Decrease Marketing Costs
You know how much it costs to publish a post on Facebook? Zero, nada, nothing! And even when you are using paid advertising on Facebook and other social media platforms, your cost tends to be lower than many traditional marketing methods.
To decrease marketing costs with social media marketing, make sure to follow these tips:
- Use it: Instead of spending so much money on newspaper ads, spend it on social media marketing. Your audience is much more likely to be on Facebook than read a newspaper.
- Use organic content to fuel your paid efforts: Always post organic content and see which pieces gain the most traction. Those are the ones you want to focus your paid social efforts on, like your sponsored social media video ads.
- Free personal contact: Instead of spending money on postage, you can reach out to your followers and connections on social media free of charge using each platform’s private messaging services.
- Offer discounts: Reach out to fans and followers and offer discounts in exchange for a shout out or a positive review. Yes, the person should highlight in the post that they are being compensated for the review, but this still provides you a low-cost way to expand brand awareness and receive positive reviews that you can use for other purposes.
Improve Customer Engagement
Advertising on the radio or TV, or in the newspaper, has major limitations because they’re one-way marketing options. There’s no way for the audience to engage with you. Social media facilitates two-way marketing where you and the audience can engage with one another. This is pertinent to building solid relationships with your customers. And thanks to the vast array of social media metric tools, you can easily measure social media content engagement.
Higher Conversion Rates
Social media marketing can increase conversions in three main ways.
First, it allows you to alleviate your customers’ fears and concerns about your product. How? Because you can post images of your product or service in action.
Go Tire did this and has enjoyed phenomenal results. Not many people were familiar with Go Tire’s services, so the owner and employees posted pictures of vehicles receiving service from Go Tire. They strategically ensured that all images had a Go Tire truck in the background to enhance their branding impact. This strategy alleviated Go Tire’s audience’s fears and uncertainties and has boosted the company’s success.
The second way that social media marketing increases conversions is by infusing social proof. Let’s say you have pins on Pinterest that feature your products. When someone clicks on one of the pins, instead of directing them straight to your site, it lands them on a third-party site that features content on one of your products. At first, you might think it’s counteractive to lead the person away from your site, but by directing them to third-party, you’re actually showing them that your product is very popular. By infusing social proof, you increase the likelihood of converting the customer by 40 to 200%.
Lastly, social media marketing helps you increase conversions because it gives you a way to collect user-generated content. When customers leave reviews and testimonials on social media, you can use those pieces of content to create blog posts, images, infographics, videos, and more. When approached correctly, social media becomes a source of endless content for you to use to increase conversions.
No doubt about it, social media marketing should be a top priority. Consumers love connecting with their favorite brands through social media.
You’ll need lots of visuals to fuel your marketing efforts, as well as a lot of SEO content. If you need help with the creation of these visuals and content, please feel free to connect with us. We have a team of visual and content creation experts ready to help.